Sleepless Whining

Well I seem to be doing really well at the forced jet lag game we are playing. For some reason we all decided to make ourselves stay up ridiculously late and then sleep in for the last week we are in Cairo. This way we won’t have so much jet lag to get over when we get home. I’m winning right now. It is currently 2:47 in the morning and I have had a lot of coffee to drink today. Speaking of coffee, normally I drink coffee to keep myself from getting a headache. But today coffee gave me a headache, or shall I say buying a coffee gave me a headache. I must start this story by saying that I had already woken up on the wrong side of the bed this morning (doing puzzles until 2am may have had something to do with this) and then we made the unfortunate decision to visit the Pyramids. The first sign that this outing was to be a disaster was the fact that the Pyramids are crawling with camels. They are everywhere; even if you close your eyes to block the hideous sight of them you can still smell their stench. Then you have the owners of the camels who desperately want to charge you an outrageous amount of money to sit on their stinking animals. These camel drivers follow so closely at your heels mostly because they really want to see their camels step on you. They get quite a laugh out of this. On top of the camels, there are a lot of very forceful men who want to sell you something, give you something even pay you to buy something. It really can be wearing on the nerves. Once we finished with the Pyramids and I was now able to say that I had actually seen them from somewhere other than the Pizza Hut across the street, we took off for the mall. As the guys were shopping for guy clothes and I was shopping for girl clothes, we decided to split up for a bit. This also proved disastrous for me because every shop I went into was being “manned” by a man. This meant that I had Egyptian guy’s eyes boring into my flesh the whole time I perused the store. And then if I wanted to try something on, well that was a whole other level of awkwardness. By the time the three of us met up again I had nothing and they each had a couple bags of clothes. When does that ever happen? As we left the mall I remembered seeing a nice looking coffee shop across the street and decided to grab a cup of java to go. That’s when things really got messy. What should have been a fast and easy process ended up not only frustrating me, but I ended up making the well intentioned greeter/waiter/barista angry to top things off. I think it all went wrong when the nice guy was trying to help me decide which kind of cheesecake I REALLY wanted to have because I “looked hungry” when all I wanted was a regular coffee. He was pretty in my face at first and after all the other in my face I had had so far today, I gave him the hand. It was pretty much a blur after that between paying an outrageous price by Egyptian standards, finding out that I paid extra for whip cream when I can’t stand the stuff and just wanted cream and scaring all the employees with my frustration at the whole day. I think tomorrow I might need to go back and take them flowers or something to apologize. They will probably all run and hide though when they see me coming.
Besides today we haven’t done anything too eventful since we got back to Egypt. We are all pretty big readers I think, so we sit around and read a lot. The first day we were back we were so lazy we didn’t even leave the house once. We even ordered in McDonalds. Can you believe that? What a truly great civilization this is. Speaking of ordering in McDonalds and other ingenious conveniences, when I was in Israel I kept seeing Blockbuster DVD vending machines on the street. Why do we NOT have those in North America? Someone needs to get on that.
Tomorrow we are going to the deaf unit that Ryan’s WONDERFUL host family runs. I am really excited about that, it should be a sweet time. I’ll update you on all the exciting things to come in a few more days. In the meantime, here is a smattering of pictures from the past couple weeks for you to enjoy. Thank you for reading and good night.


Bedouin garage.


This is our friend Soodeya from South Korea and a Bedouin woman that I passed the breeze with for awhile.


Here is the monastary at Petra. If you look real close you can see a person standing in the doorway. That should give you an idea of the size of this structure. It is completely carved out of the mountain.


Oh I wish I could post this one bigger. It's genius. Matt is really just holding his hand up so that it appears he is holding a tiny flag of Jordan when really the flag is massive and 15 miles away.


Ryan and Matt goofing off on some ancient architecture at Jerash.


Little kids in the Jewish quarter of the old city.


Japanese CIA, Israeli CIA and soldiers hanging out below my balcony awaiting the arrivel of the Japanese Prime Minister. Never a dull moment at the Petra hostel.


Surfers in Tel Aviv


Palestinian kids showing off their superbe diving skills.


A view of Tel Aviv from Jaffa


The dome of the rock and the wailing wall below. It is PACKED on Friday nights. I was in happy tears watching all the dancing, rejoicing, praying, hugging and general comradrie of everyone all evening long.


A view of our hostel, the legendary Petra hostel just inside Jaffa gate. I found a book of 19th century photography of Jerusalem and there is a picture of this hostel with the same iron balconys even. My balcony is the second in from the left where there is a girl sitting (my friend Johanna from Sweden. The boys slept on the roof


The front dooe of the Church of the Sepulchure and a Armenian priest in the background


A Pelestinian kid I met in the Arab quarter of the old city. We had a heated disagreement about Zedane's little head butting incident during the final World Cup Game and played a little soccer.


Jewish kid at the wall.


Guy at the wall.


Prayer Shawl


Orthodox man.